


Like Moss

by penlex



Series: little cuts [10]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aesir Culture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Doing Each Other's Hair, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family, Family Feels, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Formalwear, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Platonic Relationships, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Sibling Bonding, Thor (Marvel) Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-09-30 12:26:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17224076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penlex/pseuds/penlex
Summary: Loki and Thor won't take what little they have left for granted.





	Like Moss

Dappled dawn light fills Thor's apartment at the Compound, coloring everything in spots of pastel and pale. Thor knows such lighting was particularly flattering for him in the past, but he doesn't know how he looks in it now. He hasn't exactly been basking in the mirror lately. Nowadays Thor knows much about how he feels and very little about how he looks, though he dearly hopes the two don't correspond too closely. He is tired and stressed and drawn and grieving, most of the time. Every now and then there is a bright spot - camaraderie with his Earth friends or the Valkyrie, respect and deference from Heimdall, the joy of having Loki here with him - dappled sunlight in the shade of Thor's new life.

Thor sits alone now, watching the sun rise outside these expansive clear windows. He marvels at the differences between how Midgardians show their wealth and how the Ás do. Or rather, how the Ás used to. Thor's people have no wealth to show, anymore. Loki is the wealthiest of them all now, even including the King himself, and that is only because Loki happens to be able to carry much more with him than most. The fine clothing Thor wears now, for example. He's sure he'll be angry, or at least conflicted, about how Loki stole this outfit from him that he had it now, but until then Thor is just... tired.

"Don't be so melancholy, brother," murmurs the little snake in question. Thor drops his head onto the back of the couch he sits on to look at Loki, upsidedown, standing in the shadows of the doorway into the room. "You'll make me jealous."

"Aren't you always?" Thor volleys back, but he keeps his voice as low as Loki's. The morning light - among other things - is too young and delicate to be brash with. Loki gives Thor an unimpressed look as he comes into the room, but the corner of his thin mouth curls up into a smile before he can hide it.

"You're up a little early for this, aren't you?" Loki asks once he has made his way around to the front of the couch and perched on the edge of it. "Going to practise your speech in the mirror? Surely the Mighty Thor isn't nervous." Thor magnanimously does not mention Loki's own presence, awake and dressed and seeking out his big brother.

"I forgot I didn't have to do my hair." It's half quip and half truth. Thor is nervous, and he has been rehearsing the remarks he plans to make before the Sokovia Council to win all of Asgard's right to exist upon this planet. But he also really did forget about his hair. He lifts a hand to brush over his head. Tony had paid someone to 'clean it up' and make smooth where it had been so unevenly shorn. Thor knows, consciously, that he does not look bad. But neither does he look like himself.

Loki's eyes follow Thor's movement, and Thor hastily drops his hand back into his lap. He is overly aware that if he still had his hair (and if this were many years ago, before all this... _this_ between them) Loki would probably be weaving it right now. Thor's throat feels tight, his airway clogged up with the knowledge that it is not just his hair that he has lost.

"Will-" Loki breaks off, glances away, then back, and away again. Finally he adjusts himself fully onto the couch, cross legged with his knees pressing into the side of Thor's thigh. His boots will mark up the leather, but it's not Thor's couch and even if it was he doubts he'd care. "Will you do mine for me?"

"Of course," Thor whispers through his sticky throat. He shifts too (it's a minor struggle; he's so _heavy_ now, deep in his bones), straightens up and folds one leg beneath himself to face his brother.

Loki's hair is as fine as silk, smooth against Thor's fingers. It always has been, so different from the coarse strands the other three of them hav- had, though the color is a reasonable enough match to Odin's shade when he was young. Thor takes up a lock just above Loki's temple and begins to braid. Their eyes catch each other and slide away, an ebb and a flow like a quietly babbling brook; it does their talking for them.

After only two thin braids are completed, a gentle green glow highlights Loki's chin from below. Thor pauses in his work to look down at what Loki has brought forth. There is a small bundle of folded cloth on his lap. As Thor watches, Loki pulls at the cord that ties the cloth shut and unfolds it. Resting inside are several locks of golden hair, none quite the same length.

"Is-" It's Thor now who loses his voice, for just a moment. "Loki, is that mine?" Loki nods in silence, and in silence (unusual for him, but just as silver now as his words have been) he selects the longest lock and tightly binds the strands of hair together at one end with magic. He hands it to Thor, and waits.

Thor's own hair in his hand is coarse, just as he remembered it. The edge where it had been cut from him is all but sharp. Or perhaps his mind exaggerates it. Thor swallows several times. Of all the things he has to get this emotional over - and there are many - his hair probably shouldn't be one of them. But things are as they are and he feels as he feels, and so Thor allows a few tears to fall before he takes a fortifying breath and looks up at his brother again.

"Sentiment," Thor scolds Loki gently with a weak smile. A watery attempt at a joke, an effort to make lighter the things between them that are still too heavy to lift. Loki's mouth lifts again in that (un)familiar smile.

"I suppose even I can't be perfect," he says in a fake tone of resignation. Thor surprises himself with a genuine huff of laughter, short and soft as it is. Loki's smile grows at the sound. Then he turns his head to the other side and raises the nearer brow.

It takes another few hard swallows, but Thor braids his own hair into Loki's. The lighter, warmer tones of Thor's blond give Loki's pale complexion the illusion of a pinker glow. Surrounded by such darkness, Thor's hair shows clearly in Loki's where once Loki's and Frigga's were nearly hidden in Thor's.

"How does it look?" Loki asks once Thor has patted the braid to lie smoothly and sat back to admire it. Thor coughs to clear his awful, betraying throat.

"You'd make a very poor blond," he tells his brother thickly. Loki snorts indelicately.

"Seems a little dramatic, doesn't it?" Thor wonders after a pause. "A remembrance for me? I'm not dead."

"I rather think the living get more use out of being remembered than the dead ever could," Loki answers haughtily. "Imagine if I were to forget my own brother when he was standing right in front of me."

Thor grits his teeth against a flinch at the dig, hurt and guilt driving deep into his heart. But he knows now (though this is a really dickish way to bring it up) that his wrongs against Loki were not imagined after all, so he does not allow himself to look away. The only way to fix something is to first see how badly it is broken. But what Thor sees on Loki's face is not what he's expecting. There's no anger, no smugness...

Oh. It wasn't a dig. At least, not at Thor.

Thor doesn't know what to say, and so he says nothing. He's still coming to grips with the ways his younger self was misled and left unseen, still struggling to apply the knowledge that not all of his misguidedness was his own fault and not all the harm of it fell only on others. He still forgets himself sometimes, too. 

Thor's heart hurts. It hurts for himself and for his brother and his parents, and his sister too.

But it's warm here, in the sunlight of knowing that the two of them who are here now will remember the five that have gone.

Thor's hair will grow back. And other things will grow too.

**Author's Note:**

> Come chill with me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/penlex)!


End file.
